“Over the past four years, workers’ compensation rates have decreased 25 to 30 percent overall, and they are expected to go down by at least another 6 percent in 2021, which is good news for medical practices and every other business in Florida,” said Medical Malpractice and Workers’ Compensation Specialist Tom Murphy at Danna-Gracey, the largest independent medical malpractice insurance agency in Florida. “When I first started doing workers’ comp plans for medical practices 20 years ago, the rate was about $1.05 for every $100 of payroll; now that’s down to 34 cents, which is a dramatic decrease.”

 

Murphy says that this is especially surprising, considering that a number of legal decisions from Florida’s Supreme Court in 2016 had insurers believing that the rates would soon increase.

 

“The most prominent of these was the Castellanos decision in which the plaintiff’s attorney filed a suit against the workers’ compensation system and its fee schedule for lawyers,” Murphy explained. “The workers’ comp system is a no-fault system in Florida, and it was never designed to have attorneys; it was designed so injured workers could be compensated for medical care and lost time when an on-the-job injury or illness occurred.

 

“In addition to paying benefits for injured workers, insurance companies were having to pay attorneys’ fees, and these increased costs dramatically for many years,” he added. “The plaintiff bar said that the fee schedule was unfair and that attorneys were not getting paid enough to handle these cases, and it was overturned by the Florida Supreme Court. Due to this decision, it was expected that rates would skyrocket within a couple of years—up to 20 percent.”

 

The fact that this hasn’t happened has been a surprise, though it has been credited to a number of factors including the fact that technology is making workplaces much safer, and that employers are making risk management a priority.

 

“For the past 5 to 10 years, we’ve seen a lot more hospitals and medical practices, along with other businesses, hire people specifically to do risk management, looking at what their facilities can do to keep staff and employers safer,” said Murphy.

 

The big unknown in this equation is what, if any, effect COVID will have on the workers’ compensation system. “The medical world was ahead of the curve with being prepared and protecting employees and staff with regards to the pandemic, and we’ve started seeing these same precautions permeate the rest of the business world,” said Murphy. “Experts are urging caution, however, because front line workers—such as emergency responders, healthcare workers and government workers—will be filing claims for contracting COVID, as will some private employees.

 

“Gov. DeSantis has already said that if these front line workers contract COVID, they are going to be compensated because it will be assumed it was a result of their work,” he added. “But what about private entities, such as physician practices that don’t deal with COVID patients, who have employees who contract the virus? I expect that a lot of these claims in the private world will be denied unless the person can show that they contracted it in the workplace.”

 

While the future is uncertain, in the meantime, medical practices can celebrate the fact that they won’t be paying more this year for workers’ comp. “All of the other forms of insurance—such as employer liability, property and casualty, malpractice, and cyber—are going up because they’re seeing loss ratios of over 100 percent,” Murphy added. “At least this one will not be increasing in the near future.”